scholarly journals Theorising Things, Building Worlds: Why the New Materialisms Deserve Literary Imagination

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-134
Author(s):  
Babette B. Tischleder
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
Unified Approach ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
Nonhuman Agency

AbstractThe New Materialisms constitute a rich field of critical inquiry that does not represent a unified approach; yet there is a general tendency to theorise objects by highlighting their agency, independence, and withdrawnness from human actors. Jane Bennett speaks of “thing power” in order to invoke the activities of “nonsubjects,” and she suggests to marginalise questions of human subjectivity and focus instead on the trajectories and propensities of material entities themselves. This essay takes issue with Bennett’s and other New Materialist thought, and it also offers a critical engagement with Bruno Latour’s notion of nonhuman agency. In his recent work, Latour has been concerned with the question of how we can tell our “common geostory.” Taking up his literary example (by Mark Twain) and adding one of my own (by William Faulkner), this essay argues that our understanding of the powers of rivers and other nonhuman agents remains rather limited if we attend primarily to the mechanics of storytelling in the way Latour does. Rather, it is the aesthetic and experiential registers of literary worlding that offer alternative venues for imagining nonhuman beings and our interactions with them in the era of the Anthropocene.

How Artefacts Do Leadership: A Ventriloquial Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 089331892199807
Author(s):  
Jonathan Clifton ◽  
Fernando Fachin ◽  
François Cooren
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Communication ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Distributed Leadership ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Human Actors

To date there has been little work that uses fine-grained interactional analyses of the in situ doing of leadership to make visible the role of non-human as well as human actants in this process. Using transcripts of naturally-occurring interaction as data, this study seeks to show how leadership is co-achieved by artefacts as an in-situ accomplishment. To do this we situate this study within recent work on distributed leadership and argue that it is not only distributed across human actors, but also across networks that include both human and non-human actors. Taking a discursive approach to leadership, we draw on Actor Network Theory and adopt a ventriloquial approach to sociomateriality as inspired by the Montreal School of organizational communication. Findings indicate that artefacts “do” leadership when a hybrid presence is made relevant to the interaction and when this presence provides authoritative grounds for influencing others to achieve the group’s goals.

Integrating 2-D Video Actors into 3-D Augmented-Reality Systems

2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blair MacIntyre ◽  
Marco Lohse ◽  
Jay David Bolter ◽  
Emmanuel Moreno
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Programming Environment ◽  
Temporal Synchronization ◽  
Java 3D ◽  
Multimedia Production ◽  
Expressive Content ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
Human Actors

In this paper, we discuss the integration of 2-D video actors into 3-D augmentedreality (AR) systems. In the context of our research on narrative forms for AR, we have found ourselves needing highly expressive content that is most easily created by human actors. We discuss the feasibility and utility of using video actors in an AR situation and then present our Video Actor Framework (including the VideoActor editor and the Video3D Java package) for easily integrating 2-D videos of actors into Java 3D, an object-oriented 3-D graphics programming environment. The framework is based on the idea of supporting tight spatial and temporal synchronization between the content of the video and the rest of the 3-D world. We present a number of illustrative examples that demonstrate the utility of the toolkit and editor. We close with a discussion and example of our recent work implementing these ideas in Macromedia Director, a popular multimedia production tool.

scholarly journals Evolution of human signed networks

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-293
Author(s):  
Patrick Doreian
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
The Other ◽  
Balance Theory ◽  
Group Level ◽  
The Status ◽  
New Research ◽  
Human Actors

Two strands of empirical research were based on Heider’s work. One was experimental and remained true to idea that mental affect processes operating within human actors are central while the other jumped to the level of group dynamics and relegated the mental affect processes to the status of background phenomena. By the 1980s, both strands had petered out with little cumulated knowledge. Recently, the ‘group-level’ strand of research has received renewed attention. Much of the recent work, while vigorous, has fallen short precisely because it ignored some of the foundational ideas of Heider. Given this diagnosis, I suggest a new research agenda for structural balance theory that integrates the dynamics of mental affect processes with group-level dynamics.

The Silver Dream Accumulated

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Film ◽  
Thomas Dixon ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin

Chapter 3 is devoted to the film-related activities of southern literary figures. From nineteenth-century writers including Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe (not a southerner by birth, but, as author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a huge influence on southern literary history) to modern figures like Thomas Dixon, William Faulkner, Lillian Hellman, and the Nashville Agrarians, the southern literary tradition made myriad contributions to film. Faulkner’s screenwriting work provides perhaps the most engaging example. Meanwhile, the efforts of African American writers to make similar contributions were limited by the hard facts of Jim Crow, leaving such important figures as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, among many others, to generate their own opportunities, often abroad, in a far more uneven fashion. Black film critics like Lester A. Walton also emerged as important literary figures.

scholarly journals Relations of Power and Nonhuman Agency: Critical Theory, Clever Hans, and Other Stories of Horses and Humans

2020 ◽  
pp. 073112142092189
Author(s):  
Helen Wadham
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Domestic Animal ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Human World ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Nonhuman Agency ◽  
Relations Of Power

Critical Theory pioneered the theorization of human-animal relations, helping establish that agency extends beyond the human world. Nonhuman agency is now widely accepted within the “new materialisms” and beyond but there are growing calls for more critical approaches that consider why and how such agency is mobilized. These calls effectively bring together the concerns of “old” and “new” materialisms. I therefore return to Critical Theory, bringing its explanatory analysis, practical framework and future imaginary into conversation with more recent research into nonhuman agency. Together, they reveal how the relations between human and nonhuman actors shape and are shaped by their broader socio-political context. I suggest that paying closer attention to human-domestic animal relations in particular might help us resolve some of the issues at stake. Consequently, for illustrations to extend the analysis, the article turns to horses, a nonhuman group who occupy a unique place in our collective unconscious.

Mechanisms for the Reactions Following Radiative Neutron Capture in Liquid Organic Halides

1962 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Milman
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Neutron Capture ◽  
Impact Model ◽  
Unified Approach ◽  
Halogen Atoms ◽  
Organic Halides ◽  
Radiative Neutron ◽  
Radiative Neutron Capture ◽  
Work Done ◽  
The Impact

SummaryThe available data together with some recent work done by the author, have been reconsidered with regard to establishing a unified approach to the chemistry of hot atoms. It was found that the "Impact Model", originally proposed for the hot reactions of tritium atoms in gases, can also give an adequate picture for the reactions of activated halogen atoms in liquid organic halides.

scholarly journals Improving Group Decision-Making by Artificial Intelligence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lirong Xia
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Group Decision Making ◽  
Group Decision ◽  
Unified Approach ◽  
Future Directions

We summarize some of our recent work on using AI to improve group decision-making by taking a unified approach from statistics, economics, and computation. We then discuss a few ongoing and future directions.

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